Read all ten school drills in a row and something becomes obvious that reading any one of them hides. They are the same exercise, run at a different place in the body, ending in a different thing. The shared skeleton has five moves. Quiet place. Five minutes of undisturbed breathing. A hand placement. Ten minutes of charging one furnace on the breath. Then the hand goes forward and something leaves.1 Everything that distinguishes one school from another sits in two slots: which furnace you charge, and what you do at the end. So the practical position for a beginner is better than the ten separate exercises suggest. You are learning one skill with a variable, not ten skills.
All ten begin word for word the same way: sit down in a quiet, tranquil place, and breathe for at least five minutes without disturbances.2 Five minutes, every school, no exceptions and no variation. It isn't part of the charge, because the charge hasn't started yet — it's the condition for the charge. The one addition anywhere is in the furnace exercise proper, where the sequence opens with a short prayer calling on your celestial guides for protection, and closes with another prayer giving thanks for the protection and guidance received.3 The ten school drills drop both.
Each school opens with a specific hand position, and they sort into four kinds. Asking. Divinations and Invocations both put both hands out in front "as if asking or begging" — the two schools that reach for something they don't have. Praying. Benedictions puts both hands together in a praying position, and Alterations moves into that position at step three, once the charge is built.
Facing. Enchantments and Healings hold both hands in front of each other, a closed circuit between the palms, and both are schools that work on another person. Contact. Naturals puts both hands on the solar plexus, Conjurations puts the right hand on the throat — direct contact with the furnace being charged from the very first move.
Then two that stand alone. Lights starts with the hands at your sides, relaxed, the only drill that begins with the body doing nothing. And Protections starts with the right hand halfway stretched forward, palm facing out, with a strong stance and martial rigour — the only one that specifies bearing. Those two are also the schools with the largest claims attached, which may be coincidence and may not.
The middle ten minutes is where the work happens, and it's always a two-stroke cycle: the inhale does one thing and the exhale does another. Most schools fill on the inhale and distribute on the exhale. Benedictions fills the crown and then compacts the light into the spiritual body. Divinations fills the third eye and then spreads that light through brain, eyes and spine. Invocations fills the third eye and then builds a line running up to the heavens. Healings takes light in through the navel and pushes it out to the hands. Protections fills the heart into a beating globe and then circulates it through every cell.
One school breaks the pattern. Alterations fills on the inhale and compacts on the inhale too — "with each inhalation… with every inhalation" — so nothing is assigned to the out-breath at all.4 Given how uniform the other nine are, that reads as a slip in the printing rather than doctrine, and it's flagged rather than built on. Ten minutes, every school. Like the five, it never varies, and it's never justified.
The last move is where the ten separate, and the outputs fall into three kinds. Something goes out of the hand. Benedictions runs the crown-light down the neck, shoulder and right arm and out. Lights projects heaven's light from the hand. Naturals sends a luminous wave, mound, gust or flame from the solar plexus between the hands and into the world.
Something forms around you. Protections builds a sword around the hand and a shield that hardens with each breath. Conjurations builds a shimmering circle out of the words themselves, with the summoned being inside it.
Something changes inside you. Alterations turns a sphere into a cube and back. Divinations feels past and future at once. Healings puts the hands on the chest and feels them carrying healing energy. Enchantments feels the throat-light combining with spoken words. Invocations connects the senses to celestial beings.
That three-way split is the most useful thing here for choosing where to start, because it tells you what a successful session even looks like. Two schools produce something you could point at. Five produce a change in your own perception, which is much harder to check and much easier to fake to yourself.
Count the hands and a pattern appears that no single drill would reveal. Wherever a drill projects, it projects through the right hand. Benedictions: take your right hand and present it forward, and the energy descends the right arm. Divinations: right hand on the forehead. Invocations: right hand on the forehead. Enchantments: right hand on the throat. Lights: right hand in front. Conjurations: right hand moves from throat to forward. Protections: the right hand is out from the start. Alterations: right hand under the heart at the beginning, then joined with the left.
Only two drills use both hands for the ending — Healings, which places both on the chest, and Naturals, which sends the elemental picture out between them. So the default is one-handed and right-handed, and the exceptions are the two schools whose targets are large: a whole body, or a region. Nothing anywhere states this as a rule. It is simply what every drill does, and it means a practitioner who trains one school has trained the hand for all of them.
Here's the drill with the variables left blank, which is how to actually hold it. Sit somewhere quiet and breathe for five minutes — undisturbed, no count given, no ratio, no nostril instruction, just five minutes until nothing is pulling at you. Put the hands where that school puts them: asking, praying, facing, contact, relaxed or martial. If you don't know the school yet, the facing position is the most common and the most neutral. Charge the furnace for ten minutes. Inhale: the furnace fills with light. Exhale: the light does that school's job — compacts, spreads, circulates, lines upward, reaches the hands. Hold the two strokes apart. That separation is the technique, and it's the part that transfers between all ten.
Move the hand forward and let the thing happen — projection, formation, or a shift in what you can perceive. And note what is never specified anywhere: how often to do this, how many days before anything happens, or what a failed session feels like. Ten drills, twenty numbers between them, and the only two that recur are five and ten.
This page is assembled from the ten praxes rather than from a passage that states the pattern. No section names a shared skeleton; the structure is visible only by reading all ten together, and every element above is quoted from an individual drill.5 Recorded as a build finding rather than as something the source asserts.
The Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub applies to all ten. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
⚠ The Alterations drill assigns both actions to the inhalation, against the pattern in the other nine. Reported as printed; not treated as doctrine.
Unresolved: five minutes and ten minutes recur in all ten drills without ever being explained. Whether those are traditional numbers, practical minimums, or placeholders is not established anywhere in the range read.
Follow the uniformity and this is one discipline. Same opening, same duration, same breath structure, same hand, ten times — which implies the underlying skill is furnace control, and the schools are ten places to point it once you have it.
Follow the school entries and the drills are ten different trainings. Each is introduced as the praxis for that school, tied to that school's planet and station, and the harder schools are said to need capacities the easier ones don't.
The difference is practical and unaddressed. If it's one discipline, a practitioner should train the skeleton hard at one furnace and then transfer it. If it's ten trainings, transfer is exactly what won't happen, and each school has to be built from nothing. The drills look like the first and the surrounding text reads like the second.
Always Meditate After the Nyāsa — Both traditions place ten-odd minutes of structured attention on named points of the body, and both treat that as preparation for something rather than as the thing itself. The parallel runs deeper than the posture: in each case a specific site gets charged, in a fixed order, and then something is done with what accumulated.
The difference is what comes after. The nyāsa material insists on a sitting afterwards — the placement is not finished when the placement is finished, and skipping the meditation wastes it. These ten drills end at projection and stop. Nothing follows the sword, the circle, or the light leaving the hand.
So the two traditions disagree about where the value of a bodily practice lands, and each can only see its own answer. One says the charge is spent by being used, and the drill's success is the thing that leaves. The other says the charge is spent by being absorbed, and using it without settling afterwards is the error. Whether a practice ends at output or at rest decides what a practitioner does with the ten minutes after the ten minutes — and it's the single most consequential blank in this curriculum, because nothing here says what to do when the drill is over.
Sharpest implication. Ten schools, one exercise. Quiet, five minutes of breath, a hand placement, ten minutes of a two-stroke charge at one furnace, then the right hand forward — and everything that separates the schools sits in which furnace and what leaves at the end. A practitioner is building one capacity with a variable, not ten.
Generative questions.